By Elizabeth Bottman

Our family reunion in Tuscany was perfect, if you don’t count my mother’s heat stroke, the mysterious red bug bites that we all discovered and the ignition that fell out of the rental car.

We knew that Italy in June would be hot, but were surprised by a heat wave that brought 95-degree temperatures throughout our visit last summer. Each evening, we sat under an arbor for dinner, overlooking the surrounding hills and valley below. The eight of us cooked Tuscan dishes in the villa’s kitchen; minestrone topped by pesto and pasta with a sauce of fresh tomatoes. We took the recipes from a dog-eared copy of Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbook.

We had gone to Italy to celebrate my mother’s 80th birthday; my mother, father, husband, two brothers and sons, Nate, 14, and Sam, 12. For two weeks, we stayed in a villa with a sapphire-blue swimming pool, surrounded by acres of olive trees and grape vines, up in the hills.

When my brother Michael suggested Tuscany for the celebration, we all said yes. I didn’t tell him that the idea of driving in Italy -- or even riding in a car there -- almost made me say no.

I didn’t know the half of it. Michael arranged the rental of two Mercedes vans, to be picked up at the Rome airport. We arrived groggy from our flight, expecting to spend 10 minutes at the rental desk, and then to drive away. We dropped my mother and Sam in the hall outside the rental agency and Sam fell asleep on our suitcases.

We walked into a big room, to see a line of 100 people -- all waiting to pick up their cars. Three hours later, we finally struggled into the vans. It took two hours from Rome to the villa near Subbiano, going north on the autostrada.

The villa was better than the description in the brochure. Orange trees grew in pots on the lawn and there were cherry trees loaded with fruit. With the permission of Roberto, the owner, I picked pounds of the sour cherries and made compote.

Michael and Nate baked bread, pizza and focaccia in the villa’s wood-fired ovens. Nate had practiced baking bread at home, but the villa’s brick ovens were better for bread and could bake hotter than the 500 degrees of our oven.

We spent our days visiting surrounding towns -- Cortona, Arezzo, Orvieto and Sienna; then Florence and Rome. Mike and Nate took the train 300 miles south to Naples and ate pizza (the best in the world, they said) at three pizzerias, then took the train back the same day.

When we planned the trip in Seattle, Jeff and I agreed that we had seen so many cathedrals on trips to Europe, that we didn’t need to see any more. But the Duomo in Orvieto showed us that we were wrong. The Duomo rose like a spiky dream in the heat. I stood on the piazza and stared at the frescoes that gleamed in jeweled reds and blues and golds.

Sam wanted to hike every day in the hills behind the villa and, most days, we did. It was three miles from the villa to Vogonano, the little village at the top of the mountain behind us. Red-brick houses looked over large kitchen gardens. We counted rows of basil, corn, tomatoes, beans, zucchini, onions and cabbage. An old man waved to his neighbor and said, “Buon giorno, Carla. Non grazie, non voglio gli cipolla. Basta con gli cipolla.” (Enough onions.)

The vans were excellent, except for the incident in Cortona. We all went in the two vans; Jeff and I returned to the villa with Sam. Our cell phone rang, and it was Michael. “Hi, we’ll be late. The ignition fell out.” Luckily, as Mike said, there was a policeman on the scene who helped him call the rental agency, which sent someone up from Rome to fix the ignition. Three hours later, they were back at the villa, happy, with a fixed Mercedes.

We returned to Seattle at 5 p.m. on July 4th and went to bed in daylight, hardly noticing the booms and pops of firecrackers. It had been a wonderful trip.

When the family talked about ideas for vacation this coming summer, Sam said, “Let’s not go far away. Let’s go to Canada.” n